Greening of the Sea Gives Adriatic States the Blues
A plague of invasive algae is testing countries’ willingness to work together to save their marine heritage and tourist industries.
By Bojana Stanišić in Podgorica, Kotor, Dubrovnik, Split, Mljet, Bari, Ancona, Rome and Pisa
It sounds like the opening sequence to a horror film but it’s fact, not fiction. An aggressive species of algae, having made its way over the past 80 years from the Red Sea, via the Suez Canal, to the coastal waters of most Mediterranean countries, is now threatening to destroy one of the world’s most pristine marine environments.
Every year, the tropical algae, Caulerpa Racemosa, advances further under the blue waters of the Adriatic, covering the rocky seabed in a dense carpet of greenery and wiping out competing plant life forms as well as fish and molluscs.
Mediterranean countries have long been aware of the magnitude of the threat, allocating millions of euros annually to mapping the algae’s spread and to joint scientific studies.
But so far there has been little sign that governments in Adriatic countries are waking up to the challenge. While the legacy of the wars in the 1990s has long hindered scientific cooperation between Slovenia, Croatia and Montenegro, Albania’s traditional isolation and poverty has presented another barrier to effective joint work on combating the marine plague.
The longer governments wait, the more difficult it will be to contain the algae, even though its unchecked advance will undoubtedly damage the tourist industry on which all the maritime states of the Western Balkans increasingly depend.
“In a couple of years, the sea will be blue on the surface, but green on its bed,” warns Vlado Onofri, of the Dubrovnik Institute for Marine and Coastal Research. “Caulerpa is ‘ethnically cleansing’ the sea”.
